Web 2.0

I went and picked Zillow.com, which was the winner for best real estate site. It provides a birds eye view of the property you look up, along with an estimate as to its value based on home prices and public records. I looked up my own house on it and found some good information. The site was not completely accurate and does not recognize my neighbor's home for instance. And the estimate it gave for mine was about 20% more than I paid threee years ago, which with the decline of real estate prices over the last three years leaves me skeptical. On the other hand it gave a realistic value for my parent's house in southern California, which has fluctuated a lot more over the last decade and is harder to guess.

It is is kind of a useful site to recommend to patrons, but I do not know if I would recommend it too much since it is not an official estimate. For the other factors like finding details about the property such as square footage, number of bedrooms, lot size, school district informationm and year it was built it is pretty accurate. It could be useful for patrons who come in with questions about the local appraisal district vaulations of houses.

(Oops. Forgot to write this one up earlier when I looked at it.)

Final post for now

I thought 23 Things was a pretty good program for the most part. I had used or at least heard a lot about all the different "things" mentioned, but this forced me to actually go out and try to use them all.

I think they were all fairly good introductions and my main fear with many of them is that we will not be allowed to use them. I think googledocs is a good example of this since I am pretty sure the city does not want us to create documents that it can not access and store. But we have share point which allows us to do basically the same thing, but with Microsoft office software. Other examples are blogger and youtube, which I think are good tools, but I also think that if certain city employees had their way we would not be allowed to access them.

A minor issue is that if we are going to do trainings like this in the future it would be nice to have things like headphones ready for anyone who would like to use them. I had to go digging through my miscellaneous wires box in my garage to find a set. Even the little video introduction assumed you could listen to it, but many employees are using computers that the public can see and it does not look good to have headphones on when interacting with the public.

I would not mind doing another set. I am not sure how to increase the participation level and I did like the extended deadline since I was way too busy when this first started to make time for it, but have had more free time the last month or so. I like the fact that many of my fellow employees are on the same page as me and think that this could be a useful tool for things like RFID and evanced.

Downloadable media

I had used netlibrary a good deal before so I decided to try out overdrive instead. It was fairly easy to get to the titles, but I was struck by how few there were as of now, at least in the ebook format. It looks like there are only a couple of dozen titles and they are fairly random titles. The actual downloading and checkout was not too difficult, but all the different downloading and software requirements will make it difficult for some of patrons who not very tech savvy to use. I have experience using this technology and I found netlibrary very difficult to use when I first tried it several months ago. I gave up after a while and did not try again for a few months since it kept saying my software was not installed correctly. These services also tend to assume that patrons will be downloading this onto their own computers, but a lot of people want to use the public computers as their main computer and download straight to their phones or MP3 players.

I think our younger patrons might be more interested in the music since I have had several teenage patrons ask me about it. I have also had older patrons ask me lots of questions about the audio books and ebooks. I am hoping the new MP3 format becomes the standard since my main frustration helping these patrons was that the files would not play on their MP3 players and the hassle of them downloading new software onto their computers.

Podcasts

I tried a couple of the different podcasting services and thought Podcastalley.com was the easiest to use of the three. TH eNPR one was ok, but the other was tough to search. I found a couple of interesting book review sites and the ones on comic books could actually be useful for my work since I have trouble finding reviews for graphic novels sometimes before I make a decision on whether to try to buy them.

Most of the podcasts I had listened to before were from speakers who I had read or seen interviewed before I downloaded the podast and were not from subject searches. This is a good resource and could be even more helpful if I had a portable MP3 player.

Youtube

I can see youtube having lots of potential, especially for creating training material for staff and patrons. It is easy to use and imbed videos onto websites. Youtube is a fun site and useful for lots of different things.

Our patrons are already using it as much as myspace and other popular sites. It eats up bandwidth, but our library system is able to handle it now. The only other issue I see coming up is when videos are removed for various reasons if the library was planning to use them, but that will nto be regular problem.

Here are some examples of how not to behave at the library:

Google Docs

I used shared documents pretty much everyday day through work, mainly excel files. It is very useful and saves a lot of headache. Google docs seems easy enough and I know people who now use it on a regular basis for work where people are in multiple offices. I used it to create a spreadsheet and word document and it seemed pretty much just like Microsoft office.

I can see minor frustrations with people worried that they will not have access to it if they lose Internet access and worried that other people will have access to it too easily.

For my work this seems great, but because I work for a government agency I worry about if we would be allowed to store stuff off site. I personally woudl not care, but the city already saves a copy of all my emails and can access my work saved on city hard drives and they might not like the idea of city employee created documents not being under their control.

PBWiki

I tried out the PB wiki and thought it was easier to use than some of the other wikis I have tried before. I have friends and family members who have set up wikis for us to use and our church also has one that the members can use. I edited some of the "favorites" for both books and sports stars. The only thing that could be better is if it had more tools within the editing function. It was starting to look sloppy by the time I got around to adding my comments with so many people trying to make their additions stand out.